Protest laws petition (maybe)

This article claims there's a petition circulating appealing against the new Danish draft anti-protest laws. Though when I followed the link I couldn't find a petition. But when I find it, I'll sign it.

Lovely new blog!

!! Lovely new blog found! It's called Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience. Rubric says: 'Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated 2-3 times every weekday.' It's here for anyone who has yet more time to spare ..

Hee Hee Jennie, seasonT - you did it! I mean taught me to do it.

Nice-looking online newspaper to check out

I came across this online newspaper today and post it in case anyone else likes it. Broad coverage and opinionated pieces, nicely written (which is what I like). Based on my test, the Egypt coverage - that's my control, as most writing on Egypt is off topic and way out of context - it's looking good.

Wind energy

Exec Summary pp 1-2 of this of interest? It came out in September but only just came up on my Google feed.

Thanks a huge amount, Jennie and seasonT. I had to paste and print out your directions! You can't see the copy of *Internet for Dummies* on my shelf ...

Do people really not care about the right to demonstrate here?

As someone who was shocked by non-reaction to police violence against protesters outside Brorsons Kirke in August, I've been quietly hypothesizing that Danes don't really care about the right to demonstrate. I might be wrong about this, but it certainly looks that way. This is incomprehensible for a Brit. One thing we do, and we really take pride in, is that we care about being able to demonstrate and we will not allow our government to infringe these rights. They often try, and we do not let them get away with it. Note trials of police charged with assault, manslaughter etc against people in the April G-20 demonstrations in London. Digital cameras on mobile phones are wonderful and they take power away from the authorities and give it back to us so that we can shop the police if they do dodgy stuff, as they frequently do. We all know this is happening all over the world, viz. Twitter in Tehran, inconvenient videos of what the Israelis do in Gaza etc. In Britain we shout with this.

But Danes have camera phones as well. They even used them outside Brorsons Kirke. But was there any reaction? I do not understand this. If it means that Danes do not have a healthy and vigorous suspicion of their own government and authorities, then that is something both immature and seriously unhealthy about Danish society. I know that Danes trust and love their government to a degree that I can't comprehend. But do they trust and love it that far?

But anyway, I found this this morning about a raft of anti-protester extra new regulation the DK govt is apparently trying to get in place before the CPH climate conference. I have not checked out what sort of a website this is, I haven't had time. Looks to me highly agenda-driven politically, but I've no reason to suspect the information is wrong. I'm interested to see if this gets picked up in Denmark in the coming weeks ...

PS, I cringe with embarrassment, but can anyone tell me in a couple of sentences how to attach a link to text words in a post? So that it looks like, 'and I found this ' and you click on it and go straight to the page? Ouch ...

On the pleasures of driving at night

Driving home last night from Germany through into Denmark, in the dark with the wipers going, crystalline points of light against the dark, reminded me of going away for climbing weekends when I lived in London. A load of people without cars met up at somebody’s workplace somewhere unlikely in town, and by the time you’d all got to know each other over the evening, you didn’t really want to arrive. Good music - I was listening to Joni Mitchell Blue last night over and over again - warmth and comfort through the darkness, safe in the car. The lights in the darkness are hypnotic, I think. We’d arrive at a godforsaken climbing hut at the end of a track halfway up a mountain in a North Wales valley, and the horrid moment of truth would come, and it’s out of the car and carry all the gear up a track in the dark to God knows where. And you’d wake up next morning to find there was a mountain outside your window.

It was like driving my family along inside a little spaceship. A pleasure. (Until we had to get up this morning after no sleep, that is.)

Ten clues that I am just me (I was going to say international, not just British, not Scandinavian, but actually I meant, just me)

1. I am happy in a climate that is HOT, and under skies that are BRIGHT, and clear, and blue. I stayed away from Britain all those years partly because the climate was so miserable. I'm not sure what happened two years ago ..

2. I am very polite, and will always try to be pleasant to people, and the more so if they are polite to me, regardless of what their social status is. This is because (a) in a country where life is hard it is what people do to survive - it is a kind of deliberate counterfactuality - and (b) bad manners just make people repulsive.

3. I like to laugh, and like to make people laugh, and I think it is very important to see most things as absurd, most of the time. (Because they are.)

4. I am extremely eccentric. I spent much of my life getting here, and I am damned if I am going to damp myself down for pathetic types who get scared looking outside their hobbit holes. The people who speak my language are all equally eccentric or more, and in fact the non-existence of this on these northern shores is one of my chief complaints.

5. I love to read, and I love to learn, which I regard as a beautiful thing. And I regard education as the greatest excitement and its own great reward, not as something cruel to spare children from.

6. I am getting increasingly intolerant of food which doesn't have strong spice in it. I like strong clear flavours, and I've started putting chili in my tea.

7. I just want to eat prawns all the time.

8. I like to be silly, and think silliness is one of the greatest virtues. When you are being silly you are both not taking yourself seriously, which is good for the world, and being very serious about what is important.

9. I don't believe in cultural relativism. Having lived in two, no my god three cultures (British, Egyptian Arab, Danskie), it's clear to me that some things in some cultures are a hell of a lot better than others. Won't go into details in public, though. I get into a lot of trouble. We had freedom of speech in Cairo. We don't here.

10. Having learned how to be friends late in life after a miserable childhood and early life, making and being friends is something I really love to do and miss, dreadfully, here. I am a warm person and love to connect to people. When people blank me out, I retreat into a sort of internal exile to avoid misery. I hope I don't forget how to make friends living in Denmark.

And 11. Having lived in the South for years and years, and found it infinitely more fun and more enriching than the West, I know that real life can involve so much more, and so much more intensity, than the modern Western way of life. Which is a kind of dreadful poverty.

So there.